Online purchasing of goods or services from an e-commerce website generally includes at least three stages, namely registration, login, and purchase.
A user who accesses a conventional online merchant website for the first time can generally browse and select a number of items offered by the merchant, either goods or services, which the user wishes to purchase. The selected items are added to a virtual shopping cart. When then user's selection is complete, the user navigates to a checkout section of the merchant website. The user is usually required to register by completing a registration form. Registration particulars that can be required vary from one merchant website to another but typically include the user's first name, last name, email address, a selected password (usually entered twice, for safety), a physical address, and telephone number. The user can be required to formulate one or more security questions together with corresponding answers, or to answer some predetermined security questions.
It is known that such a registration process is time-consuming and tedious, involving several steps, causing a significant proportion of users to become discouraged and to leave the registration process and to abandon the virtual shopping cart altogether without completing a purchase. The merchant is left with no information about users who do not complete the registration process.
It is nevertheless desirable for merchant websites to persist with comprehensive registration requirements in order to be able to track their registered users and monitor which users are showing interest in the website, and to identify their likes and dislikes. Thus, a registration process gives rise to a trade-off between user drop-off (i.e. users who do not complete the registration process) and the ability to gain good insight into users who do complete the registration process.
If, on the other hand, the user who navigates to the checkout section of the merchant website has previously registered with the site, the user will still be required to login to the site in order to authenticate the user and complete the user's purchase. This will require the user to memorize a username (for example an email address) and a password corresponding to the merchant website. As the user registers with more merchant websites, the number of unique username and password combinations that must be memorized increases, which is cumbersome. In order to alleviate this difficulty, the user can record the username and password combinations, for example on paper or digitally, resulting in decreased security. Alternatively, the user can employ the same username and password combination across multiple merchant websites, which is contrary to best practice.
The applicant has appreciated the desirability of a simpler process for conducting online purchases than that described above.